New Publications: Barbara Cartland, Olivia Waite, Talia Hibbert, E. Marlitt, Romance Readers, and much, much more

An item I missed last year, and which is in a book that is freely available for download is:

Hall, Cailey (2025). “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels.” Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 95-108.

It focuses on Olivia Waite's The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019).

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Recently published is a biography of Barbara Cartland, by Matthew Sweet. The entry in the RSDB includes links, including to earlier biographies and autobiographies. Sweet's The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland has been reviewed by the BBC (and the article includes a quote from our own Dr Amy Burge). 

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And now on to the other new works: 

Brown, Cheyenne (2026). I Read It for the Plot: Romance and Identity on BookTok. Master of Arts thesis, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. [Excerpt]

Creel, Stacy and Walker, Crystal (2026). "SLIS Notes: Psst...Do You Have this Dirty Book?," Mississippi Libraries: Vol. 88: No. 1, Article 3.

Faraon, Capucine (2026). Les mécanismes de recommandation littéraire sur TikTok et Instagram : exposition des contenus de Dark Romance et visibilité des trigger warnings auprès des jeunes adultes de 20 à 25 ans. Masters Thesis, UCLouvain.

 

Florimond-Clerc, Adeline and Louis Gabrysiak (2026). "Lire la New Romance : pratiques, réceptions et illégitimation." Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication 31.

 

Florimond-Clerc, Adeline and Louis Gabrysiak, "New romance." Publictionnaire. Dictionnaire encyclopédique et critique des publics. Mis en ligne le 24 mars 2026.

 

Hunter, Kathryn M. (2026). “Desert Dreams: Valentino, Lawrence, and Sheik Fantasy in 1920s Australia.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 112: 56-76. [Link, abstract and some quotes.] 

 

Ingram, Toni (2026). "Romantasy, Virginity and Other Fictions." Sexuality & Culture. Online First. 

 

Jones, Bethan (2026). Sight Loss and the Tethered Self in 21st Century Novels. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [The chapter on romance is titled "Blind Love and the Will to Run in Romance Fiction by Eric Lindstrom and Lucy May Lennox". More details here.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2026). "Race, religion, and the politics of desire in Talia Hibbert’s A Girl Like Her and Take a Hint, Dani Brown." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. Online First. [Abstract] 

 

Mantere, Neea (2026). Heartthrobs and Inside Jokes: Narrative Empathy in Emily Henry’s Funny Story and People We Meet on Vacation. Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki.

 

Mundembe, Enet and Fiona F. Moolla (2026). "Marriage and Procreation: Continuities and Transformations in the Ankara Novellas A Tailor-Made Romance and Love Me Unconditionally Against the Backdrop of Flora Nwapa’s Efuru." Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

O’Connell, Mark Joseph (2026). “No More Martyrs: Heated Rivalry, Queer Romance and the End of Tragic Legitimacy.” Journal of Popular Television 14.2: 161–79. [This is mostly about the TV version of Heated Rivalry, but it does mention the novel and romance conventions. Abstract]. 

Ottaviani, Lauren (2026). "(Re)Defining Irish Womanhood: Serials and Short Stories in The Lady of the House (1890-1914)." The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature and Periodical Culture. Ed. Elke D'hoker and Phyllis Boumans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 143-158. [Excerpt] 

Partzsch, Henriette, Päivi Lappalainen, Katja Mihurko, Viola Parente-Čapková, Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, and Suzan van Dijk (2026). "One Woman Writer Everywhere: The Ubiquitous E. Marlitt". Redrawing Europe’s Literary Map. Ed. Henriette Partzsch and Viola Parente-Čapková. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Partzsch, Henriette (2026). "Moving Texts, Moving Communities: Emotions, E. Marlitt’s Fiction and the Circulation of Controversial Texts in Periodicals across Linguistic and Cultural Borders in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe." Modern Languages Open.

 

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2026). "“If not for her, nobody here would be reading this book”: Exploring Literary vs. Popular Fiction and Translation in Book of Love (2022)." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 16.2. 

Pierini, Francesca (2026). Romancing Literature: When Literary Fiction Meets Genre. Abingdon: Routledge. [Link and excerpts here.]

New to the Wiki: Final List of 2018

I probably shouldn't have let this post grow for so long as it's rather long now.

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2016. 

“Muslim Love American Style: Islamic-American Hybrid Culture and Native-Born American Black Muslim Romance.” MA thesis, SUNY Empire State College, 2016. Excerpt

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2018. 

"The Stable Muslim Love Triangle - Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 7.

Bhasin, Neeta, 2018. 

"Romancing the 'Illegal' Immigrant", Journal of Literature and Art Studies 8.10: 1459-1474. [Focuses on Serena Bell's Yours to Keep.]

 

Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher, Kim Wilkins and David Carter, 2018. 

"The Publishing Ecosystems of Contemporary Australian Genre Fiction." Creative Industries Journal 11.2: 203-221. Abstract

Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina, 2018. 

"Del cuento de hadas a la novela romántica: Una visión de la sub/literatura como gimnasio mental y laboratorio de sub/versión cultural", Repercusión de la lectura y otras formas de arte en nuestra vida y nuestra obra: Memorias del VII coloquio de LART, Centro Español de Manhattan, Nueva York, 26-28 de octubre de 2016. Ed. Paquita Suárez Coalla, Sonia Rivera Valdés, Ainoa Íñigo. West Hurley, NY: Editorial Campana, 2018. 69-95.

 

Fong, Katrina, Justin B. Mullin and Raymond A. Mar, 2013. 

"What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity". Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 7.4 (2013): 370-376.

 

Gillis, Stacy, 2018. 

“Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance”. After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 81-101. [This focuses on the "social and sexual precarity" of female characters, in particular in Heyer's Regency Buck.]

 

Glennemeier, Jaelyn, 2018. 

“And he was an Arab!:” Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E. M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik', Honors thesis, University of Kansas. Abstract and link to pdf [Bonnie Loshbaugh reports that this contains details of "a 1922 interview with [E. M.] Hull in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, and implies that it includes a photograph of Hull in front of her home." With the centenary of the publication of The Sheik coming up, it might be nice if someone could put this online.]

Gunne, Sorcha. 

‘Gender, Genre and Modernity: Popular Romance Fiction in Ireland’, Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Ed. L Harte. Oxford: Oxford University Press [in press]. [I've added this to the section about chick lit, because that's what the content mostly seems to discuss.]

 

Hopkins, Lisa, 2018. 

"Georgette Heyer: What Austen Left Out". After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 61-79. [This chapter looks in detail at military metaphors/language used by Heyer, as well as her allusions to Austen.]

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2015. 

‘Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty Shades Trilogy.’ Analyses/Rereadings/Theories 3.2: 23-33.

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

‘Defining and Redefining Popular Genres: The Evolution of ‘New Adult’ Fiction.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4 (2018).

 

Parnell, Claire, 2018. 

‘Models of Publishing and Opportunities for Change: Representations in Harlequin, Montlake and Self-Published Romance Novels.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4.

 

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2018. 

"Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s". Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Sewell Matter, Laura, 2007. 

“Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”, The Georgia Review 61.3 (2007): 444-459.

 

Turner, Ellen, 2014. 

'The Sheik Returns: Imitations and Parodies of the Desert Romance', in Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Cultures, ed. Jon Helgason, Sara Kärrholm, and Ann Steiner (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press), pp. 185-202.

Vani, Christina, 2018. 

Immortal Words: The Language and Style of the Contemporary Italian Undead-Romance Novel. Ph.D. thesis. University of Toronto, 2018.

 

Williams, Elizabeth W., 2019. 

"Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels", Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race. Ed. Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 190-204 ??. ["Williams reads Nora Strange’s interwar romance novels as they archive settler preoccupation with white sexuality in a settled space. In Strange’s novels, a repressed and declining Britain needs the “Edenic paradise” of Kenya to let loose British sexual vitality. The Kenyan environment tests would-​be parents for their moral and physical fitness in producing good settler children and awakens healthy heterosexual desires to ready parents for reproductive duty."]

Happy reading and happy 2019!